“By just presenting rambling Ondine or National Velvet as isolated, spoiled fruits, stripping away their connections to personal drama or outside world, and by languidly exposing jig-acting situations (tangled bodies on a mattress, gargantuan make-up scenes, a crazy telephone scene with a witchlike gypsy, her maddening horsey smile flashing on and off like a neon sign), the picture becomes a drum-beat of the film concept that the Moment’s the thing, and, also, that what’s Now is pretty sickening…There is no story-telling form imposing its pressure on the screen. When Brigid Polk, hippopotamus of sin, sprawls in a bathtub in white bra and blue jeans, and talks to someone just outside camera range about the drug-curing scene in different hospitals, the image is free, for itself, and wide open: the spectator, as well as the actor, can almost vegetalize inside the frame. ” – Manny Farbus on Warhol, from Carbonated Dyspepsia (1968)
Is there any film critic writing today who possesses Farber’s incisive revelatory passionate wit? Remember he was writing this in the midst of the “Moment” moment long before the Warhol corpus (Brigid Polk rather than Brigid Berlin). I’m assuming btw that the Polk moment happened in Tub Girls, 1967, which featured a lot of Viva, ““the most tiresome voice I’d ever heard” Warhol once quipped. I know because I used it in a Time Out New York feature on her husband, the great filmmaker, Michel Auder’s survey at Zach Feuer Gallery, Newman Popiashvili Gallery and Participant, Inc.http://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/michel-auder-keeping-busy-an-inaccurate-survey
Anyway, I think Farber nails it – the whole moment – yes, I’m choosing to stick with that word:) – brilliantly, and recommend reading the whole piece, which overall considers the underground/oppositional/non-narrative filmmaking of the 1960s as a disenchantment with what he calls “the pre-1960’s notion of good and/or profitable movie creation.” Film buffs, I also recommend Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, Edited by Robert Polito. USA: The Library of America, 2009. Even the Contents page is a great read:)
Farber was btw, also a painter! Someone I missed this Ps1 show in 2004, though for me they’re only interesting insofar as they relate to his film writing, still check ’em out!
